Places vs. People?

What accounts most for the huge differences in homicide rates?

Are differences in American firearm homicide rates driven more by differences in places (as U. of Chicago economist Jens Ludwig implies in his new book Unforgiving Places, which New Yorker reviewer Malcolm Gladwell believes with his usual guileless fervency) or by differences in people?

Ludwig is getting a lot of enthusiastic press for his discovery that there are two adjacent neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago in which one, formerly fashionable South Shore on Lake Michigan, has only half the murder rate of the other, more inland Greater Grand Crossing. For example, The Atlantic writes:

The University of Chicago economist Jens Ludwig opens his forthcoming book, Unforgiving Places, by describing the neighboring places of Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore, both minutes away from the elite university where he teaches.

Ludwig’s argument begins by reframing the problem of gun violence away from the demoralizing story of American exceptionalism and toward the more granular variation that differs state by state, city by city, and yes, block by block.

“Whatever you believe about the causes of gun violence in America, those beliefs almost surely fail to explain why Greater Grand Crossing would be so much more of a violent place than South Shore,” Ludwig writes.

The north side of South Shore

The Obama Library is under construction in Jackson Park just north of South Shore’s best sub-neighborhood, Jackson Park Highlands. As part of the Library’s grounds, the ex-President asked Tiger Woods to design a way to combine the 18 hole Jackson Park municipal golf course and the 9 hole South Shore municipal golf course into a super muny 18 worthy of hosting Chicago’s annual PGA Tour tournament. Tiger came up with this routing, with Lake Michigan menacing holes 14-17, which would wrap around the magnificent South Shore Culture Center, where Barack and Michelle were married.

But South Side golfers protested, not unreasonably, that they preferred their current 27 holes of cheap, easy golf to 18 holes of hard, expensive golf. So the Barack-Tiger golf plan has withered away.

In contrast to South Shore’s amenities, here’s Greater Grand Crossing:

Greater Grand Crossing

“How, in a city and a country where guns are everywhere, does gun violence occur so unevenly—even across such short distances, in this case literally right across the street?”

South Shore has only half as many murders per capita as Greater Grand Crossing! Surely, this gap of 50% must be as large as the black and white gap in the U.S.! So all we have to do is figure out what makes South Shore less homicidal than Greater Grand Crossing and we can solve the race disparity problem!

In reality … something that Americans don’t grasp is how large are the racial disparities in gun violence. For example, here are firearm homicide death rates from the CDC for males in huge Cook County (Chicago and inner suburbs), Illinois:

Black men in the Chicago area die by gun homicides 57 times as often as Asian men, 54 times as often as white men, and, perhaps most interestingly, 6.7 times as often as Hispanic men, who are roughly similar in education and income.

Paywall here.